Hayo will enable magical moves to control your connected home

March 22, 2017
by Nancy Owano

(Tech Xplore)—What if you had some virtual remote control for your home, no screen, physical remote, no yelling across the room?

What if you evoke some kind of epic scene where a superhero is in a lonely cabin up in the woods, talking to an evil hater, and gestures with one hand to get his percolator to signal the rocket to land for a quick escape?

Gisele Belliot and Alonso Ybanez founded New York-based Hayo, for "augmented reality for the connected home." Their technology approach is of interest. "Most 3-D spatial technologies scan a person's gestures and motion. Hayo takes the opposite approach: it scans your physical space and objects," said the team.

They have a patented spatial analysis technology and Ybanez has a technical background that includes image and signal processing. Hayo uses patented spatial analysis technology to create some virtual remote control combinations for the connected home.

Hayo sees and interprets space within its field of view. At play here is advanced computer vision which is used to reduce false positives, said the company, and react only when a person interacts with the virtual remote controls or barriers.

A video posted in February said: "With just a simple movement of your hands, Hayo allows you to control lights, music, television, temperature, and much more."

What is the setup procedure? Connect it to your Wi-Fi, and Hayo automatically 3-D scans your space. Once scanning is complete, you use Hayo's augmented reality app. With it, you create a virtual button on an object or in thin air.

You can check out the specs on their site. For starters, they give the minimum sensing distance as 1.31' (40 cm). The maximum sensing distance is 19.7' (6 m). The field of view is 60° (vertical) x 49.5° (horizontal). The material used is ABS plastic and glass.

They have turned to Indiegogo for help in getting through the manufacturing process. So far they have done well, surpassing their $80,000 goal, with 5 days left at the time of this writing.

Those interested in obtaining a Hayo device, should check out pre-ordering at the Indiegogo site. Hayo expects to begin shipping in September of this year.

As for developers, Hayo said they looked forward to collaborating with developers; they built an open API kit available to technologists and tinkerers shortly after launch.

ProgrammableWeb's Eric Carter said that a number of smart home platforms have already integrated with Hayo include Amazon dash, Nest, Logitech, Hue, Sonos, Wemo, Roku, Lifx, IFTTT, and Wink.

Carter said, "The API gives developers the ability to 'receive events' from virtual remote controls. Once received, the API can trigger a subsequent action through third party apps and devices."

Hayo interacts with virtual remote controls, he added, through the use of "Boxes" which he said were geometric virtual 3-D objects in space.

You can check out the Indiegogo page for price-range and offer details but $219 gets you one room, one Hayo. A note on the site says Hayo will retail for $299.